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Elementary Spanish teachers, how is your school year going?  You’re a quarter of the way through! As you move through this semester with your early Spanish learners, we wanted to help you help them with our YouTube Basics Playlist.  This is something we’ve put together to help you organize your class around target-language music.  This […]

They changed the Spanish alphabet… As we recently blogged, in 2010 the Real Academia Española made some rather significant changes to the official Spanish alphabet.  Let’s review what those were: The letters ch and ll were removed; they are now considered “digraphs.” The new name of “y” is ye. The only name for “B” is be. The only name for “V” […]

The first time I taught a kindergarten Spanish lesson, I thought if I read the story La oruga muy hambrienta (The very hungry caterpillar) enough times, kids would learn something.  Right? So, I faithfully came into my kindergarten classes, once a week for a 15-minute lesson, and read the book to them.  I was animated and […]

Committed to responsive quality If you could see us work behind the scenes here at Calico Spanish, you’d go away knowing two things for sure.  First, we are truly interested in your feedback.  Second, we are always working to make higher quality products that truly help children speak real Spanish to real people. So: ¿De qué […]

Is there anywhere a fun song for early Spanish learners that targets prepositions of location?  We couldn’t find any.  So we did it ourselves. What phrases, exactly? We call this song “Pañuelito” (little handkerchief). It accompanies Level C of Calico Spanish Stories, themed “I Live Here.”  In this level, several of the Video Stories feature our characters […]

It’s undeniable: when it comes to contact time with students in world language classes, elementary teachers have the short end of the stick. (Don’t miss a post; follow us on Bloglovin’!) (This GIVEAWAY is CLOSED.) In part one of this brief series, we shared some tips on how you can partner with your school’s computer […]